04 – Travel and Transformation: Political World-making in Non-imperial, Trans-imperial, Neutral and Colonial Spaces, 1900-1950.
Following the ‘global turn’ in history-writing, historians have shown how geographical mobility of South Asians opened up the possibilities of entanglements with other anticolonial struggles, creating global “webs” of political affinity. There have tended to be two significant lacuna in our understanding of these networks. Firstly, there has been an overwhelming spatial focus on the imperial metropolises of London and Paris, to the elision of the varied geographies of anticolonialism which encompassed non-imperial and neutral spaces like Switzerland or Mexico, as well as other parts of the colonial world beyond South Asia, like Indonesia, China or Trinidad. Secondly, there has been a relative absence of non-elite overseas Indian migrants, with research focusing predominantly on the individual educated émigrés. Very little is still known about the political worlds of the mass of Indians who emigrated - the traders, students, plantation officials and workers, sailors, soldiers, coolies, refugees, ayahs and prisoners of war who traversed long distances by land or sea, and were sometimes captured or otherwise immobilised. Even less is known about the role of South Asians in the emergence of tourism, globetrotting and similar forms of short term mobility. Some of the questions that this panel asks about travel and political transformation are: How did these South Asians on the move perceive – and participate in – these global political “webs”? In what ways were their perceptions mediated by their specific form of mobility, class, gender and other markers of social identity? To what extent can we understand these as projects of ‘world-making’? By asking these questions, the panel will address the lost political histories and geographies of Indian mobilities and migrations. Submissions to the panel are invited on non- and trans-imperial, neutral and colonial sites of non-elite migration, political encounter and transformation.
